‘Hellhole and Paradise’: The Heterotopic Spaces of Berlin

Abstract

The image of the city of Berlin in the Weimar years of the 1920s and 1930s has long vacillated between the utopian and the dystopian or, as the Expressionist writer Hans Flesch-Brunningen commented: ‘Berlin for us was despicable, corrupt, metropolitan, anonymous, gigantic, seminal, literary, political, painterly … in short, a hellhole and paradise all in one’ (Murphy, 2010, p. 669). For Stephen Spender, one of many English and American writers who visited Berlin in this period, the whole country at first ‘seemed a paradise where there was no censorship and young Germans enjoyed extraordinary freedom in their lives’ (Page, 1998, p. 39). After a while, however, the well-documented economic and political crises that eventually crushed the Weimar Republic in 1933 began to impinge upon the young English writer, as ‘the background of our lives in Germany was falling to pieces. There was a sensation of doom to be felt in the Berlin streets’ (Spender, 1953, p. 110).¹ Peter Conrad in Modern Times, Modern Places has suggested that it was ‘Berlin’s fate to be the twentieth century’s dystopia: a city of expressionist anguish, just as Paris was the capital of erotic licence for the surrealists’ (p. 319). As we will see this view somewhat polarizes too sharply the images of the two cities. For instance, the Austrian writer, Stefan Zweig, represented Berlin as a city whose dystopia was typified by its sexual morality: